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It is a measure of how close Gen Mark Carleton-Smith, the new head of the Army, has been to the thick of the action that, among the many spoils of war he has collected, he is the owner of a belt that once belonged to Uday Hussein, the son of the Iraqi dictator.

As befits an officer who previously in his career has commanded Britain’s elite special forces, the general is understandably reticent about explaining how exactly he came to own an item that once belonged to the violent and psychotic elder son of Saddam Hussein.

Suffice to say that, at the time that Uday was killed, together with his brother Qusay, during a ferocious gun battle at the family’s villa in Mosul in July 2003, Gen Carleton-Smith...